


today

by epiproctan



Series: inseparable [2]
Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel), DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Reincarnation, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:32:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epiproctan/pseuds/epiproctan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aoba had thought that by moving to a new city, by getting a new job and starting a new life, maybe he could get away. And he did escape physically, at the very least. He hadn’t talked to Sei once since he left, even in the moments of weakness when it felt like his soul was crumbling from the agony of missing him so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	today

**Author's Note:**

> you thought it was over, didn't you?

Aoba couldn't think of a single experience in his entire life more embarrassing than calling out someone else’s name during sex, particularly when that someone else was his own brother.

That was the beginning of the end for him and Noiz, of course. Afterwards, as they laid in bed together, still breathing hard and reflecting on what had just happened, Noiz had simply asked, “Isn’t your brother’s name Sei?” Aoba had quietly and humiliatedly affirmed that to be true, and Noiz had just said, “Hot,” in that flat, indifferent way of his. But no one wants to date someone who moans someone else’s name during sex, especially when the entire thing reeked so strongly of incest that it made Aoba’s nose burn, and their relationship was terminated barely three short months after it began.

He wasn’t sure what had taken hold of him when he was in that heat and that haze, but it was the same thing that came to him when he jerked off in the shower after a long day at work or woke up in the middle of the night to find his boxers wet like he was some wildly hormonal fifteen-year-old. It had something to do with a hand that was so attuned to his body that it was drawn instantly to every sensitive spot he possessed with a sure magnetism, gentle sweet lips that hid an adroit tongue, dark glittering eyes that set him on fire with nothing more than a glance. And although it had been a year since he’d last seen the figure who played a main role in his memories, those same eyes still plagued his mind daily, haunting his waking thoughts and his dreams.

Aoba had thought that by moving to a new city, by getting a new job and starting a new life, maybe he could get away. And he did escape physically, at the very least. He hadn’t talked to Sei once since he left, even in the moments of weakness when it felt like his soul was crumbling from the agony of missing him so much. He’d deleted all the pictures of him off his phone in an effort to forget the fine features of his face, and he’d changed his number so that the franticly worried messages of his twin never reached him. He’d made friends and acquaintances who knew nothing of his life and his brother. He woke up every morning alone, never having to glance across his bedroom at Sei and watch him slumbering in his bed, trying to battle thoughts about him that ranged from love-struck urges to wake him gently with kisses on his forehead to impure desires to put his mouth on other parts of his body.

But the reality that Aoba was trying his best to ignore broke through to him still in the dead of night when he sleeplessly stared at his ceiling, when he came home from work to an empty apartment, when he unwittingly gasped Sei’s name as he came into his own hand.

It wasn’t as though Aoba had developed feelings this strong for his twin on his own. He may not ever have been completely mentally healthy, but before this ordeal had started, incest wasn’t something that had ever crossed his mind. Sei was beautiful, undoubtedly, and he had always known that, but in any other situation it would have been easy to never think about his brother in this context for the duration of his life. Even if it had happened once or twice in a moment of confusion, it would have been easy to shut down and forget it ever happened. But the problem now was that these thoughts weren’t just fleeting fantasies but actual _memories_. A previous life had begun seeping through his consciousness, pulling up well-hidden remembrances of a time before when he and Sei hadn’t been brothers but lovers. As the Japanese myth went, when two lovers committed dual suicide, they would be reborn as twins. Aoba couldn’t remember what possibly had possessed him to make that decision in his past life, but the proof that it had happened was as clear in his mind as the sun in the sky on a cloudless day. There was no escaping the fact that _somehow_ , it had happened.

These memories had disturbed him to the point where he couldn’t handle seeing Sei anymore, and fled from the situation. He couldn’t deal with the idea that it felt natural to not just love Sei but to _be in love_ _with_ Sei. It hurt him on so many various levels. Longing to be with someone so forbidden was agony. The feeling that he had betrayed the trust of his brother by having such an unnatural yearning for him throbbed painfully in his chest. His own revulsion and self-disgust was a sharp soreness that permeated his body. He had thought the healthiest, smartest, least dangerous thing to do was to leave, to run away without ever even so much as glancing over his shoulder. But the feelings never stopped and the more time went on the more his desire grew, the more memories weaved their way amongst his of this life, the more and more certain he was that his deep love for Sei transcended the boundaries of death and rebirth.

He could pretend, though. He could wake up every morning and go to work, he could talk and laugh with his friends, he could date other people and drink alcohol until he forgot. He could cover it up, fill the holes in himself. But it was never quite as successful as he wished it to be, and his inability to forget Sei was an obstacle that he had yet to overcome. And time passed, in that way it has where it goes by much more quickly than you realize it is, and before he knew it, it had been more than a year.

It was two days after he and Noiz had broken up that his eyes flew open to the darkness of his bedroom, Sei’s name hard on his tongue. The brain has a way of processing everything moments too late when one is first woken, and because of this Aoba didn’t realize entirely what he was doing when he reached for his phone. Before he could fully understand what was going on, where he even was, he was clutching the phone to his ear and listening to the tinny, empty ringing.

Although somewhere in his sluggish mind he expected it, he still flinched when Tae’s voice trumpeted through the receiver.

“ _You good-for-nothing grandson!_ What the hell do you think you’re doing, calling me in the middle of the night like this?” she began. “You haven’t talked to me in _weeks_ and _now_ you call? Do you realize what time it is? It’s four-thirty in the morning, you useless idiot!”

He let her blow the angry air out of her lungs for awhile, resting against the comfort of it, until he found a fissure in her voice to finally gasp out, “Is Sei okay?”

“ _Okay_?” she echoed in a roar. “ _Okay_? You never come visit your brother, you never call him, and you have the nerve to ask if he’s _okay_?”

Awareness was starting to radiate through Aoba’s brain, bringing light to his subconsciousness. It was beginning to occur to him that at some point, somewhere along the way, he had been dreaming. That the image in his head, now fading fast into the forgotten abyss of his mind, was not real, not in this time, in this place. It was something that had made his heart race painfully and his breath come in shallow gasps, and it had to do with gashes in flesh and red-tinted water and blood-covered skin. And Sei. But it wasn’t here in his reality right now. Sei was probably fine.

It shouldn’t have mattered to him anyway. He’d had to leave Sei behind long ago.

“Um,” Aoba began to say, cutting into the barrage of reprimands coming his way. “Never mind. I’m really sorry for waking you, Granny.”

He was about to tell her to go back to sleep, that he’d call her at some point soon during the daytime, that the elderly needed their rest, when the other end of the line went strangely silent.

“Aoba.”

There was something in her voice that made him pause. Some warmth, some concern. He realized that he missed her a lot. He hadn't been home since last year, because if he went, he would have to face Sei. He knew he couldn’t do that. He just couldn’t do that.

“Do you want to talk to him?” she asked. As always, her voice was void of demands for an explanation. She didn’t know why Aoba had left—or at least he’d never told her—and yet she consistently found it in herself to be understanding once she was done with her routine roaring. Aoba didn’t deserve that, he thought. He didn’t deserve a grandmother who was kind to him, despite the sins he committed, despite having abandoned her. This hurt, too.

Almost as much as the question she’d asked him. Did Aoba want to talk to Sei? Of course. He couldn’t think of very many things in fact that he could possibly want more. The desire to hear that voice, to just listen to those precious giggles, that cheerful lilting of his tone, the way he only ever had kind and thoughtful words for Aoba, it was near overwhelming to the point where he could feel tears gathering at the corner of his eyes. Aoba wanting to talk to Sei was a given, it was _always_ a given, now or before or any time. But that wasn’t the real question. The real question was _could_ he talk to Sei, _would_ he talk to Sei. And the answer to that could only be one thing.

“No,” Aoba sighed. “I’m going to go back to sleep.” He yawned for good measure, trying to brush off the feeling that there was some kind of disapproval granted to him for this answer. He promised himself that he was being strong, and went on. “Have a good night, Granny.”

He heard an old weary sigh. “You should consider it. Goodnight, Aoba.”

As he hung up the phone and laid back down, he _did_ consider it, as he did every day. He considered what it would be like to talk to Sei again, to go back to him. And just as he concluded every other time, he knew it would only hurt, only be an impossibly painful temptation. He shouldn’t, not now, not ever again. He couldn’t do that to Sei, or to himself, or to anyone else around them.

 

And then it happened again, a week later, and Aoba was listening to Mizuki’s annoyed grumbling about the early hour while he tried to catch his breath enough to gasp out, “Is Sei okay?”

Mizuki’s irritated tone cut off mid-sentence as he processed Aoba’s words. “ _Sei_? Is _Sei_ okay?”

Aoba could understand Mizuki’s confusion, even as he tried to push through the fog of having just been ripped from sleep. It wasn’t very often that Aoba called Mizuki anymore. It used to be once or twice a week, but that number had slowly dwindled to one or twice a month. Therefore, the call itself was probably a reason for bewilderment, but in addition to that Mizuki knew that any mention of Sei was completely off-limits. Aoba didn’t know if Sei had elaborated at all, but Aoba had merely left it to him at the fact that they’d had a disagreement of sorts, and Mizuki had never pressured him into revealing any more. So for Aoba to be calling Mizuki in the middle of the night and asking after Sei certainly must have struck him as odd on multiple levels.

“He, uh…,” Mizuki went on, and more than the general sleepiness, Aoba could hear the frown in his voice. “He’s okay, I guess. I guess you could say that.”

There was something worrying about his tone, his word choice. “You _guess_?” Aoba repeated, allowing some of his remaining panic into his voice. He was starting to wake up, but that didn’t mean he didn’t care about Sei’s wellbeing. He genuinely would want to know if Sei was actually harmed in any way, even if he was beginning to become aware of the fact that asking after him right now was not entirely productive or healthy for his mental well-being.

“He’s fine but…,” Mizuki cut himself off with a sigh. “Aoba, let’s talk about this tomorrow. It’s four in the morning.”

No, tomorrow wouldn’t work. In the morning Aoba would have to somehow convince himself that he didn’t care that much. Of course he would still care, what brother wouldn’t, after all? But not to this frantic, anxious, stomach-clenching extent. Right now his mind was still fresh with some terrorizing nightmare and it was all to easy to jump to conclusions. Right now the sleep he was trying to brush out of the corners of his brain was hiding the fact that he should be concerned that he was thinking about how Sei was his _everything_ , and if anything happened to him he’d—

“What is it?” Aoba demanded. “What’s wrong with Sei?”

“Are you serious?” Mizuki let his exasperation leak heavily into his tone. “You can’t figure it out yourself?”

Figure _what_ out himself? He’d been gone for over a year. How could he know anything of what was happening to Sei? Aoba knew he was being a bother, but it was just Mizuki, after all. And Aoba needed to know.

“What’s wrong with Sei?” he repeated.

There was an exhaustion-laden sigh, and then Mizuki spoke. “Sei hasn’t been well, Aoba.” Aoba gasped, and Mizuki continued quickly. “Emotionally, I mean. Not for a long time. He’s pretty…despondent.”

Silence crackled over the line as Aoba tried to find inferences that didn’t hurt, that didn’t stab at him and make him feel like his lungs were punctured. Sei was a quiet person, but never _despondent_. Sei was always cheerful, optimistic. He thought badly of no one or of any situation. Even while bedridden, his sunny smile was never very far from his face.

“Why?”

“Think about it.” Mizuki was already fading back into sleep, and Aoba couldn’t hold onto him. “I’m hanging up. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

Aoba did think about it. For hours and hours and hours, long after Mizuki had hung up, long after Aoba should have returned to sleep, long after the sun came up and found Aoba still lying in bed, staring at his ceiling with wide eyes.

_Sei hasn’t been well. Not for a long time_.

Sei had been fine when Aoba had left him. Up until that last conversation, Sei had been exactly the same as always, all soft brightness and luminous warmth. Aoba could barely even imagine a Sei that wasn’t, a Sei that contained any traces of sadness or hopelessness as he went through the world. It wasn’t something he particularly _wanted_ to imagine, either. He only wanted to picture Sei wearing his characteristic warm gentle smile, radiating his quiet yet open friendliness, giggling his melodic little laughs whenever he found something amusing or entertaining. That was the Sei that should exist. A happy, unbothered Sei. Then _why_ was Aoba hearing about a Sei who wasn’t like that, a Sei who was _despondent_?

Aoba figured he was lying to himself if he said he didn’t know.

Sei had always been dependent on him, just as he had always been dependent on Sei. They were twins, after all, and they’d always shared everything since their very conception. Their entire lives, they hadn’t been separated for more than a weekend or a few days at most, and up until he had left, Aoba couldn’t even have imagined a life without Sei. All this was even without the added attachment that came with… _that_ problem. It created some extra pull, some intense magnetism between them that made the space between them feel almost painful. Aoba felt like he was always fighting, always dragging himself away. They had apparently come into this life as to not be separated, and yet here they were. Apart.

To say that it hadn’t upset Aoba as well would be a ridiculous lie. But at least he understood the consequences of what would happen if they were together again. If Aoba was by Sei’s side, he would want things that he shouldn’t have, and that was bad. It was as simple as that. He couldn’t have that. _They_ couldn’t have that. Why didn’t Sei understand? At this point Aoba would have begun to wonder things like if Sei’s feelings were as powerful as his own, and if Sei truly loved him as he loved Sei, but it was all pointless anyway. He wasn’t ever going to see Sei again, as long as these emotions persisted. Sei would brighten eventually. Sei would get over it, return to his normal state. He’d be happy one day.

Aoba felt uneasy.

Granted, Aoba hadn’t felt _not_ uneasy in a very long time, but today it weighed especially heavy in his consciousness. He finally roused himself from bed and began to get ready for the day, but the more he tried to push Sei from his mind, the more off-balance he felt. He had an almost foreboding ache in his stomach, and something was itching at the corner of his mind, some tendrils of his lost nightmare that tickled his brain. It made him feel almost as though he was standing on a frozen pond, over a section of ice he already knew was too thin to properly hold his weight, and he was watching the spiderwebbing cracks run beneath his feet.

Things continued like this for awhile. Aoba went to work, hung out with friends, went to the store, ate, slept. It was his usual routine, a normal schedule. But everything about it felt more wrong than usual, more like he was forcing himself. He realized that to some extent since he had moved away it had _always_ felt like that, but never had he felt it so acutely as he laid awake in bed every night, curled in on himself, wondering if Sei was able to sleep. After all, the only way that Aoba could get any rest these days was if he left his headphones on through the night. It was an old trick he often used to use as a kid when he was plagued with nightmares. It reminded him of how Sei’s old trick was to crawl into bed beside him.

On the third day since he’d called Mizuki he was aimlessly cleaning the bathroom when he stumbled across the bubble bath Koujaku had given him awhile back (“Since you seem kind of stressed these days,”) and thought that maybe, _maybe_ , the soothing ritual, the fluffy white soap and the calming scent, would be enough to drown out his thoughts for an hour or two. He sat on the edge of the tub as he ran the water, water hot enough to watch the room become crowded with the thick shimmer of steam, and undressed slowly, as though every movement pained him. It did in some ways. Sometimes it hurt just to exist.

He poured the heavy-smelling liquid into the water and watched as the faucet’s waterfall churned up bubbles where it landed, watched them spread across the clear surface like the shadow of a cloud passing over the sun. The top was dense with bubbles by the time he turned the water off, and as his pointed toes passed through them to test the scalding water, he could feel them clinging to his skin. Something about it was unsettling, somehow, the way they latched on and stuck to him, even when he took a step back from the steaming tub. He was suddenly overtaken by the desire to shower instead, but he had already prepared the bath and now he might as well sit in it.

Taking a deep breath as though he planned to dive in, Aoba stepped one foot into the tub first, then the other, feeling the burn of the water as a sudden flash of ice on his calves before his body registered that it was heat. As he watched the waves of froth slosh around his legs, he steeled himself for lowering his body into the bath. He bent his knees.

It may have been the shock of the water on his skin that did it, the heat too abrupt and stimulating for his nerves. But it was more likely that it was the situation itself, the splash and babble of the water, the thick moist air, the pressure of the tiny swells on his body, the warmth digging into his muscles. This sensation was too familiar, too painful, and he suddenly felt like he was being pulled from his mind, transported somewhere else, as his vision grew shady and dim and the world spun.

He could still see the water in front of him, bubbles now thin and clumped together in patches on its surface, but steam still rising in slow flutters. Also in his vision was a slick body, rivulets of water running down pale skin, and its comfortable weight against him, thrown over him like a protective blanket. There were possessive hands in his hair and soft lips against his ear, slender limbs pressed to his own and a bony torso sliding against his skin. The tub and its surroundings was unfamiliar to him now but sat recognized in his mind as his own, though the body on him was unmistakable.

It was Sei. His precious, beloved _Sei_.

Momentarily he realized that words were being spoken, that the melodic lilt in his ear belonged to this beautiful creature in his arms. His tone was seeped in emotion, his words chosen to provoke. Something was sad, something was hopeful, and Aoba couldn’t tell what until he tuned into the phrases and began to deconstruct them.

“…and it’s going to hurt a little bit, but it’s going to be worth it, I promise,” Sei was soothing him, the motions of his hands in his hair in rhythm with his words, stroking, comforting. “I can’t wait. It’s going to be amazing, Aoba.”

His voice was breathless, fuzzy.

But Aoba could feel himself shaking. He could feel his own heart pounding, his own blood shooting anxiously through his veins. “What if it doesn’t work? What if—”

“Don’t you trust me, Aoba?”

Of course. Of course he trusted Sei. That went without saying. He trusted Sei with every bit of himself, his mind and his emotions and his body and his love. And now he was going to trust him with his life. Not just the existence of it, but the end of it. He would just have to put his faith in Sei as he always did.

“I don't want to be apart from you anymore,” Sei began again, now separating from Aoba’s body, pulling away, holding him at a length to look into his eyes. His eyes were menacingly optimistic, almost frantic in their desire, glittering darkly. “I’m so tired, Aoba. I’m so tired of being separate from you. I’m just…exhausted.”

Aoba understood. Aoba never wanted to be apart from Sei either, but it was impossible to be by his side as he wished. He loved Sei with everything he had. If this would make it so that Sei was always within his reach, that he could share a life with Sei, that he could watch him every day and see those shining eyes and hear that laugh at any time, he wanted it. He wanted nothing more than to be by Sei’s side forever. Aoba would take the chance. For Sei.

“We’ll never have to be apart ever again,” Sei whispered, and in his memory Aoba imagined that he felt the bite of the cold steel when it bit into Sei’s skin. “We never will be apart ever again, Aoba. There’s nothing I want in my next life except you.”

“ _We’ll never be apart,_ ” Aoba whispered, fading back from his memories. “We’ll never be apart. We’ll never—”

He bolted up out of the bubbles, so abrupt that the water slopped violently from the tub. He tripped on its lip as he scrambled out of it, barely slamming his palm onto the countertop in time to prevent his forehead from colliding with its sharp edge, and his jeans stuck to his wet feet as he dragged them on. His socks were as damp as his hair when he jammed them, on his feet, into his shoes, and he was still shrugging on his coat as he slammed the door behind him.

Aoba had _killed himself_. At Sei’s request he had taken the bloody knife from his trembling fingers and sliced it into his own flesh. And for what? Not to be sitting alone in a bathtub feeling like if you turned him inside out you would only find a gaping void within. Not to be wandering through his days like he was lost and had long since relinquished his hope of ever finding a map. Not to be woken in the middle of the night by the severe anxiety that something he treasured might come to harm. No, that wasn’t why he was here today. If it was, he would never have killed himself in the first place, and this life wouldn’t have existed at all.

He was squandering something precious.

If he had been desperate before, if he had had desires and longings and wants, it all seemed to be a mere smudge of something pale and pink compared to the vivid red that was encompassing him now. Not a mere yearning but a fierce _need_ to see Sei powered through his veins. This wasn’t something he could either fight or accept. It just _was_. It _was_ like how he and Sei were, bound by a fate of their own making. By refusing this, he had refused the one he loved most, himself, his own choices, and the reason for his existence.

Aoba crashed through the front door of his old home at some minutes past three AM. He hadn’t made any attempts at logic or thinking since he had stepped into the bathtub, but it was at this moment as he kicked off his shoes in the entryway that some of his sense started to return to him. It wasn’t that he was questioning what he was doing here, since there was no point in that now, after all. This was where he was _supposed_ to be, and that was fine. He couldn’t hide from the facts of his life anymore, not when they so clearly made themselves comfortable in his consciousness. It was a more specific practicality that came to mind. Namely, what was he doing here in the middle of the night.

And what words could he say, what meanings could he convey, that would possibly make Sei understand and forgive him.

The stairs to their room disappeared under his feet, but when he arrived at the door, it suddenly seemed too heavy to even contemplate opening on his own. He hadn’t seen or spoken to Sei in more than a year. A hundred thousand doubts shot through his mind, and yet the clarity with which he saw what he needed to do was the sharpest it had ever been in his remembrance. He had shaken off some terrible burden in deciding to come here, some yoke that had sat upon his shoulders since the day he first remembered how sweetly Sei could sigh his name and how softly his fingertips could trace the lines of his body. And with the strength he’d built by carrying it, he reached forward and slid the door open.

The stillness of a sleep-filled room slowed him as he stepped inside, listening to the deep and even breathing of his twin brother. He was a ridge atop the mattress of his bed, draped in the sheets, rising and falling with the legato pace of his breath. In the dark Aoba could make out nothing more than his vague outline, but there was no mistaking the way the scant moonlight glinted off his silken hair or his thin figure even under the covers.

Aoba’s heart trembled, and then felt easy.

He drew closer. It may have been his footsteps that woke Sei, but Aoba felt that maybe it was his mere presence. In the same way that a flower turns towards the morning sun, Sei rolled towards him, his breathing pattern catching and breaking. He heaved a weary sigh, shifted, and then cracked his eyes open.

Aoba fell to his knees beside the bed and looked his brother in the eyes. It was too dark to see them very well, but Aoba had already memorized them again and again. How the dark irises seemed to be bottomless, like staring straight up into the night sky. How his eyelashes were long and soft and charcoal, how his gaze was warm and accepting. And the way he looked at Aoba, just as he was looking at Aoba now, like all good in the world stemmed from one source, and that source was him alone.

His mouth spread into a smile, the kind that made Aoba’s chest expand elatedly, and the way his laugh sounded like a joyous tambourine was just unfair.

“I knew you’d come back, Aoba.”

When Aoba smiled, it felt like the first sunshine after years of rain. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled, at least not like this, and it felt so good that it hurt. “Yeah.”

Sei shut his eyes and rolled back over, and though the motion was almost dismissive, Aoba knew it wasn’t of him. In fact, it was almost an acknowledgement of the fact that he knew that Aoba was there, that Aoba would be there when he woke, from now until the end of time. If he slept now, he would wake and find Aoba at his side. There was no need for concern. Everything could wait.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” he drawled into his pillow, already slipping back into sleep. “I missed you so much, Aoba.”

Aoba swallowed past the fond lump in his throat, and then took a deep breath before speaking. “…I missed you, too.”

Sei had almost disappeared back into his dreams, but Aoba knew that it was because his nightmares would be gone now.

“We won’t be apart anymore. We’ll never be apart again.”


End file.
